Christie, Ian and Richard Taylor (eds.). The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 1896-1939. London, UK: Routledge, 1994. Collection of primary sources on the subject of early Russian and Soviet cinema. Includes personal statements and theoretical writings of filmmakers, as well as observations by the era’s intellectuals and government.Cohen, Louis Harris. The Cultural-Political Traditions and Developments of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1972. New York, NY: Arno Press, 1974.

FIAF Symposium. L’influence du cinéma soviétique sur le cinéma mondiale/The Influence of Silent Soviet Cinema on World Cinema. Varna, 1977. Conference proceedings from the 1977 symposium of the International Federation of Film Archives.Gillespie, David. Early Soviet Cinema: Innovation, Ideology and Propaganda. Chippenham, UK: Antony Rowe Ltd., 2000.Harte, Tim. Fast Forward: The Aesthetics and Ideology of Speed in Russian Avant-Garde Culture, 1910-1930. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.Horton, Andrew. Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter with a Lash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Horton’s look inside Soviet Cinema offers insight into the production practices of the nationalized film industry, and the quagmire that comedy represented for Soviet filmmakers. Two recurrent themes in the book are the idea that it is difficult to make ideological comedies, and Brik’s statement that Soviets “don’t know what to laugh at” (41). Kenez, Peter. Cinema and Soviet Society from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin. London, UK: I.B. Tauris, 2001. This book splits the history of Soviet cinema into 3 distinct time periods, linking the filmmaking practices of each to societal contexts. The first part of the book deals with the ‘Golden Age’ of Soviet cinema in the 1920s, and thus discusses major films of this decade and the perceived need of the Bolshevik government for more films to reach the semi-literate and far-flung masses.Lawton, Anna (ed.). The Red Screen: Politics, Society, Art in Soviet Cinema. London, UK: Routledge, 1992.Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of Russia and Soviet Film. London, UK: Allen & Unwin, 1960.Mayne, Judith. Kino and the Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1989. This book deals with the sexual politics of Soviet silent films of the 1920s and early 30s, with the bulk of the text offering a detailed feminist textual analysis of five films, including Man with a Movie Camera and Bed and Sofa.Miller, Jamie. Politics and Persuasion under Stalin. New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2010.Rollberg, Peter. Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009.Shlapentokh, Dmitry, and Vladimir Shlapentokh. Soviet Cinematography 1918-1991: Ideological Conflict and Social Reality. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993. Written in the early years of post-Soviet Russia, the Shlapentokhs offer a highly polemical survey of Soviet cinema history and the use of coercion by the Soviet state on filmmakers. In their discussion of the 1920s they point out that, with the exception of 1988-1989, it was the period that offered by far the most freedom to filmmakers. Even so, they argue that state influence on cinema did exist and filmmakers critical of the regime were forced to resort to embedding coded messages in their work. Among the films they analyze are The Forty-First and Bed and Sofa, and the political prism through which they are viewed leads to some interestingly idiosyncratic readings.Taylor, Richard. The Politics of the Soviet Cinema 1917-1929. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Thompson, Kristin, and David Bordwell. Film History :An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.Verner, Andrew M., The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicolas II and the 1905 Revolution. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.Youngblood, Denise J. Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992. A history of Soviet cinema in the 1920s, with analyses of key films, performers and genres, as well as detailed biographies and evaluations of the filmmakers Yakov Protozanov, Boris Barnet and Fridrikh Ermler. The focus, as the title suggests, is on popular cinema as opposed to the now better known avant-garde directors such as Eisenstein or Vertov, and includes a discussion of the production and distribution practices for commercial films.---. Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985. The most exhaustive and in-depth history of Soviet silent films, with a focus on the years 1924-1930. Youngblood uses the era’s films as a means of studying the mechanisms of social change in the Soviet Union during this period, presenting a narrative which parallels the move from Lenin to Stalin with a cinematic move from aesthetic radicalism to socialist realism.Zorkaya, Neya. The Illustrated History of the Soviet Cinema. New York, NY: Hippocrene Books, 1989.Articles/Book chaptersAnderson, Trudy. "Sex and the Soviet Cinema: The Socialist Realist Movie." Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film & Television. 12.1 (Fall 1991): 28-33. Journal article examining the representation of sexual relations in Soviet socialist realist films of the 1930s and 40s. While the focus of the analysis is on the era following the one that is the subject of this website, it does include a discussion of 1920s films. Attwood, Lynne. "Woman, Cinema and Society." Red Women on the Silver Screen. Ed. Lynne Attwood. London, UK: Pandora, 1993. 17-130. Attwood’s long opening chapter of a book examining the representation of women in Soviet era films explores what she describes as a dialectical relationship between Soviet society and the films it produced, arguing that each influenced and shaped the other. In a discussion of the immediate post-Revolution period, she writes that the revolutionary upheavals produced an equally revolutionary transformation in sexual relations. Having established this social context, Attwood provides feminist analyses of Bed and Sofa and The Forty-First.Bordwell, David. "Historical -Materialist Narration: The Soviet Example." Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. 234. An examination of the formal characteristics of early Soviet films to determine the ways in which they reshape basic narrative strategies to meet the demands of both poetry and rhetoric.Cavendish, Phillip. “The Men with the Movie Cameras: The Theory and Practice of Camera Operation within the Soviet Avant-Garde of the 1920s.” The Slavonic and East European Review. 85.4 (2007): 684-723.Christie, Ian. "Soviet Cinema: Making Sense of Sound." Screen 23.2 (1982): 34-49. Includes a discussion of the transition to sound in Soviet cinema and the effect this had on film theory.Denkin, Harvey. “Linguistic Models in Early Soviet Cinema.” Cinema Journal. 17.1 (Fall 1977): 1-13.Hughes, Angela Ungoed and Howard Riley. “The Multimodal Matrix – A Laboratory of Devices: Film and the Formalist Legacy.” Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema. 1.2 (2007): 191-209.Kaganovsky, Lilya. “The Voice of Technology and the End of Soviet Silent Film.” Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema. 1.1 (2007): 265-181.Kenez, Peter. “The Cultural Revolution in Cinema.” Slavic Review. 47.3 (1988): 414-433. Discussion of the late 1920s campaign against both “bourgeois decadence” and “formalism” in Soviet films, within context of Stalin’s consolidation of power and other societal changes.Kepley Jr, Vance. “The Origins of Soviet Cinema: A Study in Development.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies. 10.1 (1985): 22-38. An account of the establishment and rise of the Russian film industry in the 1920s.Kleinhans, Chuck. “Marxism and Film.” The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Explores the fundamentals of Marxist analysis by examining commercial, historical, and ideological narratives perspectives of film.Miller, Jaime. “The Purges of Soviet Cinema, 1929-38.” Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema. 1.1 (2007): 5-26. Includes a discussion of the political purges in the Soviet film industry that began in 1929.Navailh, Françoise. "The Emancipated Woman: Stalinist Propaganda in Soviet Feature Film 1930-1950." Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television. 12.1 (Mar 1992): 203-210. Discusses the representation of women in Soviet socialist realist films of the 1930s and 40s, including a detailed comparison between the narrative structures and typical protagonists of the socialist realist films to those of the 1920s films. Nichols, Bill. “Documentary Cinema and the Modernist Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry. 27 (2001): 580-610. Chronicles the evolution of the cinematic documentary and the influence on its development of the Modernist avant-garde, including the Soviet experimental filmmakers.Nussinova, Natalia. “The Soviet Union and the Russian Emigrés.” The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997, 162-173.Riabchikova, Natalia. “Children’s Cinema in the 1920s: Children’s Cinema in the Soviet Union Before 1936.” Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema. 3.2 (2009): 231-235.Taylor, Richard. “Ideology and Popular Culture in Soviet Cinema: The Kiss of Mary Pickford.” The Red Screen.An overview of the reception of early cinema in the Soviet Union, focusing on The Kiss of Mary Pickford as a comparison point.Widdis, Emma. “Faktura: Depth and Surface in Early Soviet Set Design.” Studies in Russian & Soviet Cinema. 3.1 (2009): 5-32. Examines the debates around set design in this period, and includes detailed examinations of two films, The Traitor (1926, Room) and Your Acquaintance (1927, Kuleshov).Youngblood, Denise J. “The Fate of Soviet Popular Cinema During the Stalin Revolution.” Russian Review. 50 (1991): 148-162.---. “‘Americanitis’: The ‘Amerikanshchina’ in Soviet Cinema.” Journal of Popular Film and Television. 19:4 (Winter 1992): 148-157. Describes the domination of Hollywood cinema in the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s and focuses on the reactions of the Soviets to this domination. ---. “’We Don’t Know What to Laught at’: Comedy and Satire in Soviet Cinema.” Inside Soviet Film Satire, ed. Andrew Horton. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993.Online articlesColdicutt, K.J. “Turksib: Bulding a Railroad.“ Screening the Past. 2 (Dec 1997). Horton, Andrew James. “Russian and Soviet Cinema, 1896-1953: The Beginnings to the Death of Stalin.” GreenCine.